DRC ‘warzone’ makes controlling Ebola extremely difficult, says WHO
Geneva — Containing an Ebola outbreak in a "warzone" in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is among the most difficult challenges the World Health Organisation (WHO) has faced, a top official said on Friday. The outbreak declared in North Kivu province on August 1 poses the same problems as past cases in the DRC, including major logistical hurdles in a volatile country with weak health infrastructure. But in North Kivu, health workers will have to navigate their response among more than 100 armed groups, 20 of which are "highly active", WHO’s emergency response chief Peter Salama told reporters. "On the scale of degree of difficulty, trying to extinguish an outbreak of a deadly high-threat pathogen in a warzone reaches the top of any of our scales." The outbreak in North Kivu in eastern DRC was declared a week after WHO and the Kinshasa government hailed the end of an Ebola flare-up in north-western Equateur province, which killed 33 people. Salama underscored that the successfu...
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